Fighting for Space

  Orlin credits their success to word of mouth. Early clients vouched for SPOT, and news spread that users could trust the staff. Reluctance to visit the site faded away. “A lot of people come in, and other people in the room say, ‘This is a space where you can trust [the staff], you can be honest with them. You’re safe in here. These are good people.’” Those positive relationships led to a number of unintended benefits. Orlin remembers one morning in June 2017 when she showed up at work to find a woman waiting for the clinic to open.

  “She sleeps outside and uses outside, and she was sexually assaulted,” Orlin begins. “And this was the first place she came to seek care.” SPOT staff took the woman inside and into an adjacent room where there was privacy.

  “First we listened to her story,” Orlin says, “and tried to remind her that all of what has happened isn’t her fault, because she had a lot of guilt and shame about what happened. And then on top of that, she was using heroin and pills and stuff to combat what she’d just gone through.”

  Once the woman’s immediate needs were met, SPOT staff began talking about what happens next. They wanted her to go across the street to the emergency room, but the woman was reluctant. There was an outstanding warrant for her arrest and if she told doctors that she’d been assaulted, she was worried they’d call the police. So SPOT phoned ahead to the ER and ensured that the woman would receive treatment without the hospital involving law enforcement. They also gave her a backup plan: if she still felt uncomfortable when they took her over to emergency, she could leave and come right back to SPOT and they would examine and treat her there (not something the clinic is designed for but something it could do in a pinch). In the end, the woman was treated in the emergency room.

  Orlin says that SPOT is “serving as a place for some of our most vulnerable patients.” It’s an interesting unintended benefit, but most of SPOT’s successes are much simpler.

  “People wake up and they don’t remember how they got here. They’ll say, ‘Oh my god, you just let me rest in here? And now you’re giving me a coffee and a sandwich? Thank you.’ Or people wake up and say, ‘Without you, I would be dead.’”

  43Characteristics of Fentanyl Overdose—Massachusetts, 2014–2016 (Atlanta, GA: US Department of Health and Human Services/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017).

  44Data Brief: Opioid-Related Overdose Deaths among Massachusetts Residents (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Department of Public Health, May 2017).

  Chapter 21

  The Hair Salon

  At ten on a Saturday morning in September 2000, more than 1,500 people gathered in the parking lot of Strathcona Elementary School, two blocks south of Oppenheimer Park.

  While Mark Townsend and Bud Osborn were organizing protests in the streets, business owners from the Downtown Eastside’s neighbouring communities of Chinatown, Gastown, and Strathcona were doing the same.

  The hundreds of people who met at the school that morning came together from those neighbourhoods—which formed a ring around the Downtown Eastside—to create an umbrella organization called the Community Alliance. The crowds that its leaders could call to the streets vastly outnumbered those that VANDU could gather, and they had the police on their side.

  “Evidence of the growing chasm between Downtown Eastside residents and merchants fed up with drug-fuelled mayhem and the area’s drug users and their allies came face to face in the street for the first time Saturday,” reads a newspaper account of the day.45

  “Although billed as peaceful, the march was tense from the beginning as social activists faced off against up to a dozen private security guards hired by Chinatown merchants,” reads another article. “Police had no problem with the leather-gloved security workers, who could be seen frequently pushing activists and media out of the way.”46

  A third headline from two months prior sums up a sentiment that had been building in some parts of the city: “Fed-up Merchants Tell City to Arrest Junkies.”47

  From the school, the crowd marched through the Downtown Eastside to Vancouver’s old convention centre on the downtown waterfront. Their private security guards formed a line at the front.

  Mark Townsend had obtained a map of the route they had planned and, with VANDU’s help, set up stations along the way where volunteers explained different harm-reduction programs. “I thought what we should do is march with them for a bit and do a counter-demonstration,” Townsend remembers. “So if a journalist came and asked a question, at least their report would say, ‘Some people said this and some people said that.’” Portland staff and allies equipped with walkie-talkies hid in vans along the Community Alliance’s protest route. As marchers drew near to each van, PHS staff jumped out to present an opposing side for the cameras. Their numbers were far fewer that day—only a few dozen compared to the 1,500 marching against them—but Townsend’s strategic organizing ensured that they were at least heard.

  “Eight police officers on bicycles kept the two groups separate, but tensions ran so high that within three blocks paddy wagons had to be called in and the first arrests were made for breach of the peace,” another newspaper article reads. “Each arrest was met with loud cheers from the [Community Alliance] marchers. As the wagon moved away, the protesters inside could be heard chanting and banging on the doors.”48

  Bryce Rositch, an architect and the head of the Gastown arm of the Community Alliance, is quoted in media reports from that day: “We’re not against any specific program or facility or anything,” he said. “What we’re saying is that there’s been so much here now, it truly is saturated. That’s what we’re saying, ‘no more in our neighbourhoods.’”49

  “There is more to the community than drug dealers and others,” Rositch said, quoted in another report. “We all have a responsibility to help those in need, but we also have a responsibility to make sure our communities are safe.”50

  Richard Lee was a vocal spokesperson for the Community Alliance and the leader of its strongest contingent, the Chinatown Merchants Association. Today, he remembers the Community Alliance as the underdog.

  “At the city, we had no friends, in the provincial Liberal government, we had no friends, in the federal government, we had no friends,” Lee says. “All we wanted was for treatment to be the ultimate goal that we were working toward. But the other side was not prepared to yield to that. At that point, VANDU was a strong voice and they wouldn’t concede that.”

  Lee remembers racial slurs lobbed his way at that protest and others like it. There was vandalism committed against the Chinese Merchant Association’s headquarters. And Lee said people called his home late at night only to hang up when he answered the phone. But he said he holds no grudges.

  “With the numbers that we had, the march could be considered a success,” Lee says. “But in the end, they won the day.”

  In May 2001, Mayor Philip Owen had successfully pushed his councillors to adopt the Four Pillars framework and its new direction for the city’s response to drug addiction. Included in the plan was a pledge to establish a task force that would “consider the feasibility of a scientific medical project to develop safe-injection sites or supervised consumption facilities in Vancouver.” But in 2002, there was an election and Owen didn’t run for office.

  He was succeeded by Larry Campbell, the coroner who had attended that meeting at the Carnegie Community Centre alongside Ann Livingston and Melissa Eror, in 1994. Campbell was onboard with harm reduction, and during his election campaign he promised to open an injection site. But drug users didn’t trust him, or any politician, by this point.

  On April 7, 2003, it appeared their lack of faith was justified. “Police on horseback, motorcycles and foot patrol launched an unprecedented block-by-block campaign Monday to rid this city’s notorious Downtown Eastside of drug dealers,” reads one newspaper’s report.51 Campbell had increased the number of police officers assigned to the Downtown Eastside from twenty to sixty.

  A few weeks earlier, Livingston and Osborn�
�s old friend, Dave Diewert, had scraped together some money and rented another Downtown Eastside storefront for VANDU. This one was at a prime location, 327 Carrall Street, just beside Pigeon Park and across from the old Portland Hotel. Their plan was to use it to host VANDU’s hepatitis C subgroup meetings, strategize actions on low-income housing and gentrification, and to host weekly get-togethers for coffee, which they called “Not Just Coffee.” Methamphetamine had arrived and created a new population of drug users in the Downtown Eastside, and so another VANDU subgroup consisting of members addicted to this relatively new drug also made use of the storefront. They named the new space the Carrall Street Centre for Compassion, Solidarity, and Resistance.

  The place was a dump. It didn’t even have functional plumbing. Livingston remembers that the toilet in the back was elevated because it used gravity to evacuate waste. Outside, an old sign painted onto the brick is still partly visible today. “Louvre Rooms 35 cents a night,” it reads.

  As shoddy as it was, Livingston had a bit of a reputation by this point, and was worried that the landlord wouldn’t rent it to her. “I went to Dave Diewert and said, ‘Look, I’ve done this enough times now so I’m worried, if the lease is in my name, that there’s going to be a problem,’” she says. “This was a war. We had been kicked out of the Dunlevy place because the police had gone to the landlord. So I said, ‘Dave, if you put it in your name, then it won’t be in mine.’”

  For a while, their landlord had nothing to fear. The storefront on Carrall really was a simple meeting place. Then the new mayor sent his occupation force into the Downtown Eastside and Livingston decided she would turn 327 Carrall into a political attack.

  “Adding those forty cops was the deal-breaker,” she says.

  Livingston was at home when she received a phone call telling her they had arrived.

  “Joey was a baby, under a year old, and couldn’t walk. So I threw him in the stroller, called Bryan [Alleyne] and Dean [Wilson], and said ‘We’ve got to go do this.’”

  Livingston remembers that it felt like a foreign military had descended on the neighbourhood. “There was almost no one around,” she says. When someone did venture out of the hotels, they were questioned by police. It was pouring rain, and officers were forcing people to lie face-down on the wet sidewalks and remain there while they were put through body searches. “It was like an occupation.”

  A related police operation saw 162 arrest warrants issued, most of them for low-level dealers who were addicts themselves.52 Drug users had been pushed to the streets and the alleys, and now the cops were taking those away from them. Diewert explains that VANDU and the entire Downtown Eastside felt betrayed. They had supported Campbell during his campaign for mayor. And while they knew the Four Pillars drug strategy was one-quarter enforcement, it was supposed to be equal parts prevention, treatment, and harm reduction. But all they’d got was more police. “It was getting unbearable,” Diewert says. “He [Campbell] brought more cops into the Downtown Eastside and that was having a detrimental effect on people using. It was creating more harmful situations for them.”

  Since police were taking away the alleys, VANDU would give drug users a safe space indoors: 327 Carrall Street. Except they couldn’t pay for it. VANDU was fully funded by the health authority at this point, and if it opened an illegal injection site, it would very likely lose that money. Another unlikely ally emerged: a backroom operator from the former mayor’s conservative Non-Partisan Association, Philip Owen’s son, Christian.

  “In the waning days of my father’s time at city hall, there was an election,” Christian begins. “Larry Campbell said that he would push for the Four Pillars. Still, in many people’s eyes, it was a political third rail that was rolled up in the harm-reduction issue. And so the whole initiative at 327 Carrall, as far as I was concerned, was to make him make good on his political promise to open Insite.”

  Christian started making twice-weekly visits to 327 Carrall to identify where he could best help out. He wasn’t a nurse who could treat abscesses or an activist who had credibility on the street. “I was a suit,” Christian says. “I couldn’t really add any value.”

  So he played to his strengths. “Initially, I wrote a personal cheque, just to make sure we could pay the rent and keep it alive for thirty days,” Christian says. “Then my thought was, ‘I’ve got to go out and raise money to keep the lights on and to keep this going.’ We had no idea, in that moment, how long we’d be in business,” he continues. “So it was done with the view that this was going to be here until we got what we wanted.”

  Once again, Livingston was running an illegal-injection site. “The scene was pretty squalid,” she remembers. “We’d made it as nice as we could, but it was still really old and we didn’t have any money.”

  The property was split into two large rooms. At the front, there was a big window that faced onto Carrall Street. It had a table near the door where a VANDU member checked people in and a larger table that people collected around for meetings. The back room was once a kitchen and still had a sink that produced water, sometimes. That’s also where the bathroom was, in an adjacent cubby. Livingston had someone cut the bottom of the door off so they could see if anyone in there overdosed, and that became the injection room. Then, before long, the entire back half of the property was being used as a space for supervised drug use.

  The Carrall Street Centre for Compassion, Solidarity, and Resistance operated as a collective where everyone who hung out there pitched in to keep the place relatively clean and orderly. A nurse named Megan Oleson put in more hours than anyone else. (She declined requests for an interview.) Coming in a close second was another young woman named Jill Chettiar.

  She was working for the Portland Hotel Society at the time, helping them with administration. Chettiar says that 327 Carrall showed just how easy it could be to establish a space for injection-drug use that was much safer than the alleys. “It was just a hang-out space, and there was an injection room in the back,” she explains. “It was pretty casual. There wasn’t a ton of rules. We really weren’t asking for the world,” Chettiar continues. “This is how fucking easy it is, guys. This is just a room. We painted it, and we’re keeping it clean. It’s literally just this easy.”

  She recalls how the arrival of meth made 327 a little more chaotic a space than Livingston’s previous two injection sites. “I remember so many times hanging out with Megan when we would just look at each other and shake our heads,” Chettiar says, laughing. “Like, ‘What’s going on? What are we doing? Did we just hang out with Christian Owen? And did he just make coffee for an injection site that’s open illegally?’”

  In a similar vein, Livingston recalls how much the Carrall site’s injection-drug users loved having baby Joey around, who she jokes was there “building up a strong immune system.”

  “The news guys were there one day, and they wanted it to be all dark and dreary, but then there was this baby being passed around,” Livingston says. “It really fucked up the ambience thing they were going for.”

  Dean Wilson laughs at those memories. “CNN comes up and there’s this couch there and there’s fucking two-year-old Joey, playing with his blocks in the injection site,” he says.

  Christian Owen put up a lot of money to keep 327 Carrall open for as long as it was. Today he maintains that his motivations were mostly political, aimed at holding Larry Campbell to his promises and ensuring that his father’s goal to see a legitimate injection site in Vancouver was realized. But Livingston suggests there were also more personal reasons for Christian’s interest in harm reduction.

  “Their family friends had a daughter,” she explains, “who got addicted to heroin. She was only nineteen when she died in this neighbourhood in an SRO … From Christian’s point of view, it was the girl next door who he grew up with. That was the connection.”

  Christian acknowledges that story. He even brought the girl’s mother, a registered nurse, onboard as a financial backer of the sit
e. But he says it wasn’t why he paid the rent at 327 Carrall.

  “We just knew it was the right thing to do,” Christian says.

  For the next several months, police swarmed the Downtown Eastside. The Carrall Street injection site received a low degree of harassment during this period. Officers parked their squad cars directly out front as a way to dissuade drug users from hanging out there. But it nevertheless remained open as a high-profile thorn in the side of Larry Campbell’s new administration at city hall.

  While those battles raged in full view of the public, the Portland Hotel Society had initiated a covert operation.

  By 2002, PHS was receiving millions of dollars in government funding every year. But Evans and Townsend were still running it like the small nonprofit they had formed a decade earlier. The government didn’t like that and was intensifying pressure for more formal organization.

  In response, Townsend recalls how he and Evans sat down with Dan Small and Kerstin Stuerzbecher to essentially fabricate official duties to list alongside everyone’s name in an effort to placate their bureaucratic overlords.

  “They kept telling us they wanted an org chart and so I said, ‘Fuck you, we’ll send you an org chart,’” Townsend says.

  Small remembers the meeting the four of them held as a little more productive than that. “We broke up the organization’s key roles for the directors,” he says. “Everyone would have a cluster of responsibility.” Evans would manage staff, essentially functioning as the Portland’s human-resources department, leading training sessions, negotiating contracts, and that sort of thing. She also liaised with political partners. Much to her disappointment, it all inevitably left her with a lot less time with tenants. Stuerzbecher took the lead on program implementation and became increasingly busy with budgets and financial planning. Townsend would continue to steer the organization on political activism and also manage nuts-and-bolts operations and the maintenance team. And Small was assigned “the torture of VANDU,” in Townsend’s words, “attending board meetings and making sure that no one was murdered.”